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The Bonehead Mistake That Brought Down an Online Drug-Dealing Empire

138 points by doh 13y ago

tghw 13y ago
Doubly dumb since StackOverflow doesn't even require an actual account to post questions.
- itafroma 13y ago
  > StackOverflow doesn't even require an actual account to post questions That hasn't been the case since mid-2011[1]: you must have an actual account to ask questions on Stack Overflow. [1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/107152/encouraging-users-to-create-an-account-and-keep-it/107163#107163 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/107152/encouraging-u...
  - tghw 13y ago
    You are correct. I hadn't noticed that change.
anonymous 13y ago
This sounds a bit too dumb to be the actual dread pirate roberts. Could he be the third owner of the site? IIRC the original DPR just set it up not with some ideals in mind, but just to sell drugs. Then he left it to the next DPR, the one they allegedly busted. Maybe the one they busted is actually the third one?
- atlanticus 13y ago
  Even someone with the name anonymous can make a mistake, right BH?
  - anonymous 13y ago
    right BH? What? If you imply those are my initials, I'm sorry to say you're mistaken.
    - atlanticus 13y ago
      Dammit!
- nerdo 13y ago
  More likely DPR made all that up because he thought it sounded cool.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
Sounds like parallel construction. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
- bargl 13y ago
  Think about the implications if the court that prosecuted this case threw it out due to unconstitutional intelligence gathering. He doesn't deserve to get off, but wouldn't a decision like that have implications across the US? I claim no knowledge of legalese other than having watched Law and Order, so if this is ridiculous please edify me.
  - TinyBig 13y ago
    Think this would fall under "fruit of the poisonous tree". If the source of the evidence is tainted, anything that came from that source is also tainted. This doctrine is well enough established that undermining it would have far greater implications than letting a single lawbreaker go free.
- mcovey 13y ago
  Agreed. The official story sounds made up.
- rayiner 13y ago
  What about it sounds like parallel construction?
  - axus 13y ago
    The part where they connected his new StackExchange username to information they pulled from the machine image of Silk Road they'd already made in July. Finding the machine and busting the VPN that connected to it were the real ways they tracked him down. Oh, and of course the Customs and Border patrol seizure of the forged documents he ordered, during a "routine inspection".
  - tedunangst 13y ago
scotch_drinker 13y ago
"Okay! I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail." Michael Bolton. No not that Michael Bolton.
stevewillows 13y ago
In a sense I almost feel for the guy.. Then again, I don't. The tinfoil hat in me wants to believe that this is all one big FBI / CIA set up and they're looking to see who will try and step up. But again, that's just crazy.
- wcfields 13y ago
  Well, don't do crazily illegal shit, and the tinfoil can stay in the kitchen cabinet.
  - stevewillows 13y ago
    How would one even launder that kind of money? What does he do come tax season?
  - yk 13y ago
    Well, THEIR orbital mind control lasers work even if you do not plan to do crazily illegal shit.
MrBuddyCasino 13y ago
Wait - he posted something about php, curl and tor on StackOverflow, using - for less than one minute - his real name? And that is supposed to link to the operator of Silk Road? I don't know about you, but that seems very far fetched to me. Also, it indicates that SO saves all changes made to a user profile, forever, which I think is a bit unusual. However, if thy caught the right guy, hats off to the prosecutors for making the link.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  That's only one of many pieces of evidence they found, if you read the original complaint. It helps corroborate other pieces, too.
- corresation 13y ago
  This sounds like incidental corroborative evidence. It hardly seems like it was what "brought down" the site, as claimed by the linked. The site was likely brought down because the FBI or others found the server and took an image of it, and everything else seems to be backtracking corroboration from that. How did they find the server? Well therein lies the mystery, and it is likely because the FBI and other three letter agencies have a very strong interest in Tor, almost certainly having thousands of nodes that can statistically winnow down to real IPs.
- mbq 13y ago
  SE community mod here; SE devs are good old delete-nothing guys, they collect everything ever posted and a lot of metadata. Likely in good faith to fight spam, but bits are bits.
16s 13y ago
I've posted questions about Tor on stackoverflow using my real name, but I'm not a criminal nor do I have any desire to be a criminal. It seems odd to me that questions like this on a technology site could somehow be used to incriminate people. Maybe the goal is to prevent people from asking questions. What you ask can and will be used against you?
- skwirl 13y ago
  If you think he was arrested for posting a question about Tor to Stack Overflow, then you really have a lot of catching up to do on this story.
  - 16s 13y ago
    I know he has been accused of doing very bad things. I just hate to see Tor and its users vilified like this. Bad people use Tor for bad things, but good people use it for good things too. And making people feel that simply asking questions about Tor will put them in the same category as hardcore criminals is just wrong. We're not all heartless criminals. In fact, most just want a bit of privacy.
    - vehementi 13y ago
      That's not what is going on here.
    - TheCapn 13y ago
      For the record, the reason why his slip up was significant is because: 1) They were able to find code identical to the SO question within the SilkRoad source code 2) They already had circumstantial evidence linking him to the site, this just strengthened it 3) "frosty" is the user/computer name used to generate the private ssh key on SilkRoad's server, further linking him to the site
- andreyf 13y ago
  Asking the question is not incriminating, but it can be used to prove that he is the guy who was running SR.
ianstallings 13y ago
Having trouble using curl in php? Because a environment variable wasn't defined? And then ran to SO before trying to print the variable values?.. /facepalm Edit: Everyday it's the same old shit. One post goes up in votes, another goes down. Why? Who the hell knows. Must've pissed someone off that doesn't know curl.. I swear I have to walk on egg shells in this place. Either way I'm really starting to get tired of this shit. Pull those marshmallow pants up.
- bluedino 13y ago
  He's obviously not a curl or php expert. Where else should one go for help?
  - ianstallings 13y ago
    It's newbie shit and he got in over his head. What other mistakes did this fool commit? Think about it. You're setting up a marketplace for dangerous people. People that will kill you if anything goes awry. On the other side are people that want to send you to prison. It behooves you to know WTF you are doing.
    - eliasmacpherson 13y ago
      Ahem, "schlep blindness" :)
- smcl 13y ago
  I'm not sure about the downvotes either, maybe HN dislikes things like "/facepalm" (I don't care, btw). However I share your disbelief. The guy was running a fairly advanced, high profile, illegal market online and a key piece of evidence linking him to this crime was down him messing up something really pretty simple in a PHP script and asking on a programming Q&A site - that's pretty astonishing.
  - ianstallings 13y ago
    That really was my whole point. He got in over his head and he got smacked down for it. Now he's going to prison. It's laughable.
PaperclipTaken 13y ago
Similar to the other comments, this seems virtually unrelated to the actual arrest. This article makes it seem as though the single mistake is what allowed DPR to get nabbed, and yet there is a lot more going on in the investigation. It was a boneheaded mistake but it's not what got him arrested.
alecsmart1 13y ago
This is just horrible journalism. Exactly what I'd expect from a motion picture movie for a dumbed down audience. Definitely not HN top worthy.
Sprint 13y ago
> According to the criminal complaint, Ulbricht posted the question using his own real name. Less than one minute later, he changed his username to “frosty.” How was it know then? Did they record the traffic and see it there? Did SO tell them?
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  They may have subpoena'd SE for all records on all users asking for questions relating to managing Tor hidden services.
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  I'd imaging they began with the 'frosty' name, which led to SO, which lead to a subpoena, which got them logs and the name.
bsullivan01 13y ago
Many Feds made their bones on the war on drugs and the jobs and reputations of many more still depend on the war on drugs. Then you have some guy that makes tens of millions selling heroin, cocaine and everything illegal under the sun--online. Safe to say that unofficially he was FBI's top ten person to catch, he was making a fool of them. And if they want they can tighten lots of screws and even have satellites monitor over an area. As I said on another thread, I suspect that NSA or DEA got his name illegally and then whispered it to certain FBI agents. Of course for the evidence to be admissible FBI has to make believe that they got him by his mistakes (parallel construction.) Not to suggest that you can hide forever, he should have retired after pocketing $10 million
itafroma 13y ago
Funnily enough, I think it may have been Stack Exchange's (SE) somewhat unintuitive registration procedure that did him in. Stack Overflow requires an OpenID identity in order to ask questions: you cannot sign up without one (though SE now provides their own you can sign up for). You could easily set up your own (and it's surprising that Ulbricht did not), but you could also use any number of providers (e.g., Facebook and Google) that ostensibly know your real name. When you link your OpenID to SE, SE automatically fills in your name with whatever your OpenID provider has on file. I believe this is where Stack Overflow got his real name from initially. He probably didn't realize this would happen and when he saw that it did, he quickly changed his Stack Overflow profile to the "frosty" moniker. Though it was absolutely boneheaded (possibly with a fair amount of hubris that he'd never get caught) to have an OpenID identity somewhere with his real name and then use it on an untrusted (to him) third-party site, had the SE login page indicated that it would pull information from his OpenID identity to create his SE profile or emphasized creating an account with SE over logging in with OpenID, he might not have had his name leak in this manner.
- macNchz 13y ago
  This is reminiscent of the way that gravatar can cause people to unintentionally leave traces of their identity around the web. http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-email-s-hash-is-not-a-good-idea http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-e...
- kmontrose 13y ago
  There would have been an interstitial page mentioning that his email was being given to Stack Exchange by his OpenID provider. Depending on when exactly when he registered, there may have been (and now always is, when using a third party login iirc) another page on the Stack Overflow side that confirms new account creation and again displays the provided email. Basically, he clicked through at least one "sending personally identifiable information, are you sure?" page. Maybe more than one. Disclaimer: Stack Exchange Inc. employee, I've done some work on our user login stuff in the past.
  - fabian2k 13y ago
nostromo 13y ago
I don't understand the arrest. The FBI isn't dumb. They know that 10 SilkRoads will popup in the vacuum they just created. And those new marketplaces won't make the same mistakes SilkRoad just made. Once they found the server, they had an all-access pass to the most popular black market in modern history. They could just sit back and make bust after bust after bust... But instead, they exchanged their Palantir for a single arrest of a 20 something San Francisco nerd.
- migrantgeek 13y ago
  "The FBI isn't dumb" The FBI is just a collection of people. Some dumb, some smart and most fall somewhere in-between. My guess is the person(s) responsible wanted this on their performance eval ASAP so they can try to make a promotion. That's just a wild guess of course. Without knowing the team responsible for the bust it's hard to know what the long term goal was but my experience with government work is that most employees are more concerned with their career and paycheck than long term safety and security of the public.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Nah. Cops and prosecutors want the big fish, not the little fishes. The little fishes will always exist, but the harder and more expensive it is to build a place for them to get together, the less likely it is that they'll find places to make their illegal transactions. (Not to mention that big fish make for splashier prosecutions and faster promotions. DAs build a platform from which they can spring into a political career from by nailing big names, not nobodies.) It's the same reason why they offer plea bargains to low-level drug dealers if they'll give up the people above them in the supply chain: it does more damage to the overall network to take out the one person it all hinges on than to take out lots of people out at the fringes. The network has to reconstitute itself, which is slow and expensive.
  - jobu 13y ago
    "Not to mention that big fish make for splashier prosecutions and faster promotions." You hit the nail on the head there. Nabbing the "Dread Pirate Roberts" is definitely a career making move for any moderately ambitious investigator or district attorney.
iblaine 13y ago
If it wasn't a post on stackexchange then it would have been something else. SR going down was inevitable.
jrochkind1 13y ago
I am really dubious that this is really what brought him down. Do you think they really investigated everyone they could find that ever asked a public question about Tor hidden services? If not, what role do you think this evidence played in the investigation? They suspected a few people, but then when they found that one of them had asked this question, and then investigated him more deeply? That seems kinda unlikely to me too. And of course, the lone fact of asking such a question on StackOverflow is not (yet) enough to indict or arrest someone in America. They included this piece in their list of evidence, sure; they included it in their press release, for sure, it makes good press (because it's more understandable than most of their stuff, and because it makes them look good). But I suspect it's really a case of "parallel construction"[1] -- they found this piece of evidence long after they had identified him, in part due to NSA information, but are just pretending it's what tipped them off. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
- citricsquid 13y ago
  This is not what brought him down, it was just a nail in the coffin. The FBI did the fairly straight forward thing: 1. Look for the oldest mentions of SilkRoad 2. Investigate the people talking about SilkRoad before it was established... that's all they had to do, he publicly outed his identity on bitcointalk.org, This article isn't very good...
- nathan_f77 13y ago
  You might be right. From the article: > Based on forensic analysis of the Silk Road Web Server, I know that the computer code ... includes a customized PHP strip based on 'curl' that is functionally very similar to the computer code described in Ulbricht's posting on Stack Overflow, and includes several lines of code that are identical to lines of code quoted in the posting. > Oh, and the encryption key on the Silk Road server ended with the substring "frosty@frosty." Whoops. I don't know if that encryption key was a public key, or if they found it after gaining access to the server. But if it was public, then a search for the username 'frosty' would have turned up the SO profile. You also can't do 'forensic analysis' on HTML to figure out the PHP code, so they must have used an exploit. Or like you say, it was retrospective, after taking control of the server.
larrik 13y ago
Am I crazy, or was the question posted in March of 2013, and not 2012 like the article states?
S_A_P 13y ago
I can see the scumbag Stack Exchange memes on Reddit now :)
theartfuldod3r 13y ago
can't wait for the follow up article: "one weird trick to make sure that your online drug-dealing empire doesn't get brought down"
AsymetricCom 13y ago
Parallel construction requires PR support.
JunkDNA 13y ago
So does the guy who answered this get a "Aiding Criminal Masterminds" badge? In all seriousness, I know that this feeling is irrational, but I would feel pretty terrible if I helped someone on SO and then came to find out they were running a billion dollar criminal enterprise.
bhitov 13y ago
I don't think this is what did him in. Posting advertisements for silk road [1] and then posting his personal email address [2] from accounts with the same name seems the more likely cause. 1) http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 2) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5....
logn 13y ago
If the NSA sniffed his bits, you must acquit.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
highwise 13y ago
Messing with the law can improve your reputation, after all. http://stackoverflow.com/users/1249338/frosty?tab=reputation&sort=graph http://stackoverflow.com/users/1249338/frosty?tab=reputation...

138 points by doh 13y ago

tghw 13y ago

Doubly dumb since StackOverflow doesn't even require an actual account to post questions.

itafroma 13y ago
> StackOverflow doesn't even require an actual account to post questions That hasn't been the case since mid-2011[1]: you must have an actual account to ask questions on Stack Overflow. [1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/107152/encouraging-users-to-create-an-account-and-keep-it/107163#107163 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/107152/encouraging-u...
- tghw 13y ago
  You are correct. I hadn't noticed that change.

anonymous 13y ago

This sounds a bit too dumb to be the actual dread pirate roberts. Could he be the third owner of the site? IIRC the original DPR just set it up not with some ideals in mind, but just to sell drugs. Then he left it to the next DPR, the one they allegedly busted. Maybe the one they busted is actually the third one?

atlanticus 13y ago
Even someone with the name anonymous can make a mistake, right BH?
- anonymous 13y ago
  right BH? What? If you imply those are my initials, I'm sorry to say you're mistaken.
  - atlanticus 13y ago
    Dammit!
nerdo 13y ago
More likely DPR made all that up because he thought it sounded cool.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

Sounds like parallel construction. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

bargl 13y ago
Think about the implications if the court that prosecuted this case threw it out due to unconstitutional intelligence gathering. He doesn't deserve to get off, but wouldn't a decision like that have implications across the US? I claim no knowledge of legalese other than having watched Law and Order, so if this is ridiculous please edify me.
- TinyBig 13y ago
  Think this would fall under "fruit of the poisonous tree". If the source of the evidence is tainted, anything that came from that source is also tainted. This doctrine is well enough established that undermining it would have far greater implications than letting a single lawbreaker go free.
mcovey 13y ago
Agreed. The official story sounds made up.
rayiner 13y ago
What about it sounds like parallel construction?
- axus 13y ago
  The part where they connected his new StackExchange username to information they pulled from the machine image of Silk Road they'd already made in July. Finding the machine and busting the VPN that connected to it were the real ways they tracked him down. Oh, and of course the Customs and Border patrol seizure of the forged documents he ordered, during a "routine inspection".
- tedunangst 13y ago

scotch_drinker 13y ago

"Okay! I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail." Michael Bolton. No not that Michael Bolton.

stevewillows 13y ago

In a sense I almost feel for the guy.. Then again, I don't. The tinfoil hat in me wants to believe that this is all one big FBI / CIA set up and they're looking to see who will try and step up. But again, that's just crazy.

wcfields 13y ago
Well, don't do crazily illegal shit, and the tinfoil can stay in the kitchen cabinet.
- stevewillows 13y ago
  How would one even launder that kind of money? What does he do come tax season?
- yk 13y ago
  Well, THEIR orbital mind control lasers work even if you do not plan to do crazily illegal shit.

MrBuddyCasino 13y ago

Wait - he posted something about php, curl and tor on StackOverflow, using - for less than one minute - his real name? And that is supposed to link to the operator of Silk Road? I don't know about you, but that seems very far fetched to me. Also, it indicates that SO saves all changes made to a user profile, forever, which I think is a bit unusual. However, if thy caught the right guy, hats off to the prosecutors for making the link.

ceejayoz 13y ago
That's only one of many pieces of evidence they found, if you read the original complaint. It helps corroborate other pieces, too.
corresation 13y ago
This sounds like incidental corroborative evidence. It hardly seems like it was what "brought down" the site, as claimed by the linked. The site was likely brought down because the FBI or others found the server and took an image of it, and everything else seems to be backtracking corroboration from that. How did they find the server? Well therein lies the mystery, and it is likely because the FBI and other three letter agencies have a very strong interest in Tor, almost certainly having thousands of nodes that can statistically winnow down to real IPs.
mbq 13y ago
SE community mod here; SE devs are good old delete-nothing guys, they collect everything ever posted and a lot of metadata. Likely in good faith to fight spam, but bits are bits.

16s 13y ago

I've posted questions about Tor on stackoverflow using my real name, but I'm not a criminal nor do I have any desire to be a criminal. It seems odd to me that questions like this on a technology site could somehow be used to incriminate people. Maybe the goal is to prevent people from asking questions. What you ask can and will be used against you?

skwirl 13y ago
If you think he was arrested for posting a question about Tor to Stack Overflow, then you really have a lot of catching up to do on this story.
- 16s 13y ago
  I know he has been accused of doing very bad things. I just hate to see Tor and its users vilified like this. Bad people use Tor for bad things, but good people use it for good things too. And making people feel that simply asking questions about Tor will put them in the same category as hardcore criminals is just wrong. We're not all heartless criminals. In fact, most just want a bit of privacy.
  - vehementi 13y ago
    That's not what is going on here.
  - TheCapn 13y ago
    For the record, the reason why his slip up was significant is because: 1) They were able to find code identical to the SO question within the SilkRoad source code 2) They already had circumstantial evidence linking him to the site, this just strengthened it 3) "frosty" is the user/computer name used to generate the private ssh key on SilkRoad's server, further linking him to the site
andreyf 13y ago
Asking the question is not incriminating, but it can be used to prove that he is the guy who was running SR.

ianstallings 13y ago

Having trouble using curl in php? Because a environment variable wasn't defined? And then ran to SO before trying to print the variable values?.. /facepalm Edit: Everyday it's the same old shit. One post goes up in votes, another goes down. Why? Who the hell knows. Must've pissed someone off that doesn't know curl.. I swear I have to walk on egg shells in this place. Either way I'm really starting to get tired of this shit. Pull those marshmallow pants up.

bluedino 13y ago
He's obviously not a curl or php expert. Where else should one go for help?
- ianstallings 13y ago
  It's newbie shit and he got in over his head. What other mistakes did this fool commit? Think about it. You're setting up a marketplace for dangerous people. People that will kill you if anything goes awry. On the other side are people that want to send you to prison. It behooves you to know WTF you are doing.
  - eliasmacpherson 13y ago
    Ahem, "schlep blindness" :)
smcl 13y ago
I'm not sure about the downvotes either, maybe HN dislikes things like "/facepalm" (I don't care, btw). However I share your disbelief. The guy was running a fairly advanced, high profile, illegal market online and a key piece of evidence linking him to this crime was down him messing up something really pretty simple in a PHP script and asking on a programming Q&A site - that's pretty astonishing.
- ianstallings 13y ago
  That really was my whole point. He got in over his head and he got smacked down for it. Now he's going to prison. It's laughable.

PaperclipTaken 13y ago

Similar to the other comments, this seems virtually unrelated to the actual arrest. This article makes it seem as though the single mistake is what allowed DPR to get nabbed, and yet there is a lot more going on in the investigation. It was a boneheaded mistake but it's not what got him arrested.

alecsmart1 13y ago

This is just horrible journalism. Exactly what I'd expect from a motion picture movie for a dumbed down audience. Definitely not HN top worthy.

Sprint 13y ago

> According to the criminal complaint, Ulbricht posted the question using his own real name. Less than one minute later, he changed his username to “frosty.” How was it know then? Did they record the traffic and see it there? Did SO tell them?

MichaelGG 13y ago
They may have subpoena'd SE for all records on all users asking for questions relating to managing Tor hidden services.
mmanfrin 13y ago
I'd imaging they began with the 'frosty' name, which led to SO, which lead to a subpoena, which got them logs and the name.

bsullivan01 13y ago

Many Feds made their bones on the war on drugs and the jobs and reputations of many more still depend on the war on drugs. Then you have some guy that makes tens of millions selling heroin, cocaine and everything illegal under the sun--online. Safe to say that unofficially he was FBI's top ten person to catch, he was making a fool of them. And if they want they can tighten lots of screws and even have satellites monitor over an area. As I said on another thread, I suspect that NSA or DEA got his name illegally and then whispered it to certain FBI agents. Of course for the evidence to be admissible FBI has to make believe that they got him by his mistakes (parallel construction.) Not to suggest that you can hide forever, he should have retired after pocketing $10 million

itafroma 13y ago

Funnily enough, I think it may have been Stack Exchange's (SE) somewhat unintuitive registration procedure that did him in. Stack Overflow requires an OpenID identity in order to ask questions: you cannot sign up without one (though SE now provides their own you can sign up for). You could easily set up your own (and it's surprising that Ulbricht did not), but you could also use any number of providers (e.g., Facebook and Google) that ostensibly know your real name. When you link your OpenID to SE, SE automatically fills in your name with whatever your OpenID provider has on file. I believe this is where Stack Overflow got his real name from initially. He probably didn't realize this would happen and when he saw that it did, he quickly changed his Stack Overflow profile to the "frosty" moniker. Though it was absolutely boneheaded (possibly with a fair amount of hubris that he'd never get caught) to have an OpenID identity somewhere with his real name and then use it on an untrusted (to him) third-party site, had the SE login page indicated that it would pull information from his OpenID identity to create his SE profile or emphasized creating an account with SE over logging in with OpenID, he might not have had his name leak in this manner.

macNchz 13y ago
This is reminiscent of the way that gravatar can cause people to unintentionally leave traces of their identity around the web. http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-email-s-hash-is-not-a-good-idea http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-e...
kmontrose 13y ago
There would have been an interstitial page mentioning that his email was being given to Stack Exchange by his OpenID provider. Depending on when exactly when he registered, there may have been (and now always is, when using a third party login iirc) another page on the Stack Overflow side that confirms new account creation and again displays the provided email. Basically, he clicked through at least one "sending personally identifiable information, are you sure?" page. Maybe more than one. Disclaimer: Stack Exchange Inc. employee, I've done some work on our user login stuff in the past.
- fabian2k 13y ago

nostromo 13y ago

I don't understand the arrest. The FBI isn't dumb. They know that 10 SilkRoads will popup in the vacuum they just created. And those new marketplaces won't make the same mistakes SilkRoad just made. Once they found the server, they had an all-access pass to the most popular black market in modern history. They could just sit back and make bust after bust after bust... But instead, they exchanged their Palantir for a single arrest of a 20 something San Francisco nerd.

migrantgeek 13y ago
"The FBI isn't dumb" The FBI is just a collection of people. Some dumb, some smart and most fall somewhere in-between. My guess is the person(s) responsible wanted this on their performance eval ASAP so they can try to make a promotion. That's just a wild guess of course. Without knowing the team responsible for the bust it's hard to know what the long term goal was but my experience with government work is that most employees are more concerned with their career and paycheck than long term safety and security of the public.
smacktoward 13y ago
Nah. Cops and prosecutors want the big fish, not the little fishes. The little fishes will always exist, but the harder and more expensive it is to build a place for them to get together, the less likely it is that they'll find places to make their illegal transactions. (Not to mention that big fish make for splashier prosecutions and faster promotions. DAs build a platform from which they can spring into a political career from by nailing big names, not nobodies.) It's the same reason why they offer plea bargains to low-level drug dealers if they'll give up the people above them in the supply chain: it does more damage to the overall network to take out the one person it all hinges on than to take out lots of people out at the fringes. The network has to reconstitute itself, which is slow and expensive.
- jobu 13y ago
  "Not to mention that big fish make for splashier prosecutions and faster promotions." You hit the nail on the head there. Nabbing the "Dread Pirate Roberts" is definitely a career making move for any moderately ambitious investigator or district attorney.

iblaine 13y ago

If it wasn't a post on stackexchange then it would have been something else. SR going down was inevitable.

jrochkind1 13y ago

I am really dubious that this is really what brought him down. Do you think they really investigated everyone they could find that ever asked a public question about Tor hidden services? If not, what role do you think this evidence played in the investigation? They suspected a few people, but then when they found that one of them had asked this question, and then investigated him more deeply? That seems kinda unlikely to me too. And of course, the lone fact of asking such a question on StackOverflow is not (yet) enough to indict or arrest someone in America. They included this piece in their list of evidence, sure; they included it in their press release, for sure, it makes good press (because it's more understandable than most of their stuff, and because it makes them look good). But I suspect it's really a case of "parallel construction"[1] -- they found this piece of evidence long after they had identified him, in part due to NSA information, but are just pretending it's what tipped them off. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence-laundering https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

citricsquid 13y ago
This is not what brought him down, it was just a nail in the coffin. The FBI did the fairly straight forward thing: 1. Look for the oldest mentions of SilkRoad 2. Investigate the people talking about SilkRoad before it was established... that's all they had to do, he publicly outed his identity on bitcointalk.org, This article isn't very good...
nathan_f77 13y ago
You might be right. From the article: > Based on forensic analysis of the Silk Road Web Server, I know that the computer code ... includes a customized PHP strip based on 'curl' that is functionally very similar to the computer code described in Ulbricht's posting on Stack Overflow, and includes several lines of code that are identical to lines of code quoted in the posting. > Oh, and the encryption key on the Silk Road server ended with the substring "frosty@frosty." Whoops. I don't know if that encryption key was a public key, or if they found it after gaining access to the server. But if it was public, then a search for the username 'frosty' would have turned up the SO profile. You also can't do 'forensic analysis' on HTML to figure out the PHP code, so they must have used an exploit. Or like you say, it was retrospective, after taking control of the server.

larrik 13y ago

Am I crazy, or was the question posted in March of 2013, and not 2012 like the article states?

S_A_P 13y ago

I can see the scumbag Stack Exchange memes on Reddit now :)

theartfuldod3r 13y ago

can't wait for the follow up article: "one weird trick to make sure that your online drug-dealing empire doesn't get brought down"

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Parallel construction requires PR support.

JunkDNA 13y ago

So does the guy who answered this get a "Aiding Criminal Masterminds" badge? In all seriousness, I know that this feeling is irrational, but I would feel pretty terrible if I helped someone on SO and then came to find out they were running a billion dollar criminal enterprise.

bhitov 13y ago

I don't think this is what did him in. Posting advertisements for silk road [1] and then posting his personal email address [2] from accounts with the same name seems the more likely cause. 1) http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 2) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5....

logn 13y ago

If the NSA sniffed his bits, you must acquit.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

highwise 13y ago

Messing with the law can improve your reputation, after all. http://stackoverflow.com/users/1249338/frosty?tab=reputation&sort=graph http://stackoverflow.com/users/1249338/frosty?tab=reputation...